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A Tissue Proteolysis Activity Mapping and Substrate Discovery Platform for Identifying Novel Tumor-Activated Biosensors

Algov, I.; Van Heest, A.; Hopton, M. T.; Liang, F.; Holmes, A.; Hao, L.; Zhou, X.

2025-08-22 bioengineering
10.1101/2025.08.18.670718 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Dysregulated extracellular proteolytic activity is a prominent hallmark of cancer and can thus be exploited for tumor detection and therapeutic development. However, the discovery of tumor-responsive probes has been hindered by the lack of methods capable of capturing proteolytic events directly in tissue samples. Here, we report PSurf, a platform that enables the identification of tissue-specific protease sensors with tissue specimens. Through differential selection of tumor-specific sequences over healthy tissue, PSurf identified context-specific tumor-activated probes that precisely distinguish metastatic lesions in lung tissue slices. Using these substrates, we engineered nanobody-targeted biosensors that release urinary reporters upon tumor-specific cleavage in vivo, enabling precise noninvasive tumor detection in a murine lung metastasis model. PSurf provides a foundation for developing conditionally activated agents through tissue-specific activity mapping and probe discovery.

Published in Nature Chemical Biology (predicted rank #2) · training set

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